Harvill Secker and Vintage are delighted to have acquired an ambitious trilogy from the extraordinary Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami. 1Q84 is comprised of three books, the last of which has only recently been announced in Japan for publication there next summer. The first two volumes came out in Japan this year with no information about their content being released before publication. They caused a sensation and 2.23 million copies are already in print. The books are set in the fictionalised and distorted year of 1984 between the months of April and June, July and September, and October and December. UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, have been acquired and Harvill Secker will publish the first two volumes in a single edition simultaneously with Knopf in the States in September 2011. The paperback editions will be published by Vintage. The first two books are being translated by Jay Rubin and the third by Philip Gabriel.

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. Following the publication of his first novel in Japanese in 1979, he sold the jazz bar he ran with his wife and became a full-time writer. It was with the publication of Norwegian Wood - which has to date sold more than 4 million copies in Japan alone - that the author was truly catapulted into the limelight. He is now Japan's best-known novelist abroad and his work has been translated into forty-two languages.

˜Murakami must already rank among the world's greatest living novelists' Guardian

˜A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of the contemporary heart and head' Jay McInerney

˜Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon – a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original' New York Times

Note: The title is pronounced ˜One Q Eighty-four'. This is a reference to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four as the letter Q [ky&#363;] is pronounced the same in Japanese as the number 9 [ky&#363;].